I recently was running into problems with my old VPS provider ConnectSwitch with things like regular downtime. I wasn’t really bothered to go chasing after them every time so I decided I’d look elsewhere for hosting.

I’d only ever heard good things about SliceHost before so I decided for many reasons on top of their good reputation to give them a try.

So far they’ve been great. I’ve had to talk to support for some little things so far and the response times have been incredibly good. Email’s are replied to almost instantly if you don’t want to try their numerous other support methods like IRC or their own chat service.

On top of all that they’re reasonably priced especially with the Dollar to Euro conversation rates these days.

Long story short, if you need a new host give them a try. It’ll be worth your while

Recently I decided that I would try to replace my Apache installation with one of it’s competitors to see what could be gained from a change. While I’d heard good things (and bad) about Lighttpd (lighty) I decided it would be interesting to go with the underdog nginx.org

nginx.org was originally developed to cater for the needs of Rambler, a Russian search engine. It has quickly gained numbers though, and recent surveys put it as fifth most used web server on the internet today. It has many nice features, but above all has a reputation for stability, something I can’t say Lighttpd has in quantities.

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A while back during MacHeist 2 last year I acquired a copy of the GTD application for OS X called TaskPaper. At the time I didn’t think much of it, I saw it as a simple app for making to-do lists rather than anything else and I didn’t really have a need for it. It has been sitting in my Applications folder almost completely unused for almost a year now until I started looking into GTD methods to get some hint of organisation around all the stuff I’m doing.

I played around with the Things demo for a while and I have to say I was quite impressed with it. Things provides a really nice interface which made it easy to use, which was a big plus. Things also sports an iPhone app which synced perfectly with the Desktop version. The one thing (no pun intended) that put me off was the price. Buying the pair of applications for both the phone and the desktop would cost just over €50 which is quite a bit, considering the times we’re in. I also found that while Things sported a lot of nice features, that I wouldn’t necessarily use all of them, so it wasn’t really worth it.

Then I re-discovered TaskPaper sitting in my Applications folder. After firing it up and looking at it properly for the first time I realised it was much much more than a simple application for making to-do lists.

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